Raymond Lee and Jennifer Ikeda in Qui Nguyen’s “Vietgone.”Credit
Emon Hassan for The New York Times

For positive proof that in certain realms of theater, we have moved firmly beyond political correctness, see “Vietgone,” a raucous comedy by Qui Nguyen that strafes just about every subject it tackles and every character it presents. Sure, sometimes it wobbles uncertainly between satire and sentiment, but Mr. Nguyen’s fresh and impish voice rarely lets up as he thumbs his nose at our expectations.

As the character of the playwright (Paco Tolson) explains at the top of the show, the principals are Vietnamese who become refugees in America. The show is set in 1975, but these characters, he says, won’t sound the way you might expect them to. Scanning the audience at City Center, where the play opened on Tuesday in a Manhattan Theater Club production, Tong (Jennifer Ikeda), a 30-year-old Vietnamese woman, observes, “Damn, there’s a lotta white people up in here.”

This voice, the playwright reminds us, is more or less the opposite of the Asian one of stereotype, as in: “Herro! Prease to meeting you! I so Asian!” The Americans in the play, he adds, will speak like this: “Yee-haw! Get ’er done! Cheeseburger, waffle fries, cholesterol!” They do indeed.

Mr. Nguyen nails, rather smartly, the dissonance of immigration, which runs both ways — the Americans and the Vietnamese in the play are almost always misunderstanding one another — as well as the hegemony of the majority over the minority, as both are represented in the dominant culture.

He also freely indulges in anachronism. Quang (Raymond Lee), for instance, also a 30-year-old Vietnamese refugee, whose relationship with Tong is at the core of the play, frequently breaks into explosions of rap, bursting with the usual vulgarity. Never mind that rap was virtually nonexistent back then, let alone a staple of his culture. (Naturally, you think of the similarly audacious use of rap in “Hamilton.”)

Mr. Nguyen, a co-founder of the downtown theater troupe Vampire Cowboys, is clearly a playwright with an inventive mind, and while “Vietgone” has many pleasures — including jazzy comic performances from an excellent cast, several in multiple roles, under May Adrales’s direction — it suffers from a lack of discipline. Scenes drag on longer than they need to — reams of dialogue could be cut with no loss — so that its strengths are sometimes blurred.

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Excerpt: ‘Vietgone’

Jennifer Ikeda and Paco Tolson in a scene from Qui Nguyen’s show.

By MANHATTAN THEATER CLUB on Publish Date October 24, 2016.
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Some of the early passages take place in South Vietnam, which is about to fall to the North Vietnamese. In one, Tong receives with impatience a weepy marriage proposal from Giai (Mr. Tolson), eventually cutting him off by suggesting, “Hey, do you maybe just wanna do it?” (Meaning have sex, not marry.)

Quang, meanwhile, a pilot fighting for the South, is arguing with his best friend, Nhan (Jon Hoche), about whether they should hire hookers, until Quang’s wife, Thu (Samantha Quan), shows up. He’s miffed that she has not brought their two children, since he hasn’t seen them in months. But both Quang and his family, and Tong and Giai, are separated when Saigon falls.

Much of the rest of the play takes place in various places in America, where the Vietnamese refugees have settled or been parked. As Tong puts it, in her own bitter rap:

Ironically we’re the ones they call the lucky onesBut can we make a new life now that our old lives are done?America tries to help us start all overBy putting us in camps in the middle of nowhere

Her mother, Huong (Ms. Quan), is none too impressed, either. “I thought everything would be super-nice here in America,” she complains, noting the spare barracks they live in. “That’s sorta what they advertise,” she cracks.

Eventually, Tong and Quang strike up a romance, although Quang’s determination to return to his family in Vietnam inspires him to hit the road with Nhan on a motorcycle, in a quixotic effort to reach California and hitch a ride on a ship. On the way, Quang offers Nhan an American civics lesson, having observed the way blacks are treated by whites: “North and South Vietnam may be at war, but at least we’re not fighting each other over something as stupid as the way we look.”

“Vietgone” contains a sprinkling of such preachiness. It also tends to sprawl, with the chronology becoming confusing. But the vibrancy of the performances, and the stylish production — the set by Tim Mackabee pops with color and life —generally keep the more obvious or repetitive passages from becoming draggy.

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Ms. Ikeda’s aggressive Tong is a particular pleasure, bluntly propositioning Quang soon after they meet. Mr. Lee brings biting force to Quang’s angry raps about his desire to return home. Other cast members play multiple roles persuasively, with Ms. Quan having fun with Huong, cranky but not above making her own lascivious moves on Quang (before he’s met her daughter).

Broadly speaking, “Vietgone” examines the consequences of the choices the characters made or the fates that were forced upon them. But even these sobering issues are mostly treated in Mr. Nguyen’s elbow-in-the-ribs style. (I wasn’t surprised to read in his bio that he currently writes for Marvel Studios.) There’s no rule, of course, that serious subjects cannot be approached in a subversively comic manner, but with the harsh experience of refugees a topic of obvious momentousness today, the flippant tone of “Vietgone” does sometimes pall.

Still, proving he is not straitjacketed into his style, Mr. Nguyen also includes darker moments, as in a nightmare sequence when Tong envisions the carnage left behind in Vietnam. And the play ends with an immensely moving scene between the playwright character and his father.

Lifting his foot from the pedal of irreverence, Mr. Nguyen depicts them as they try to reconcile the perceptions of the war that divided families and generations, both in America and in Vietnam. The laughter subsides; the play’s flaws recede; and we are left with a resonantly ambiguous picture of the manner in which wars, and the tides of refugees they often result in, have an indelible impact on individual lives.

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